So Blackwood’s was published and Edinburgh city, we may be sure, set up a roar of delight and anger.  Never before had one’s friends been so assailed.  Never before had one’s enemies been so grilled.  How pleasing for a Tory fireside was the mud bath with which it defiled Coleridge, who was—­and you had always known it—­“little better than a rogue.”  One’s Tory dinner was the more toothsome for the hot abuse of the Chaldee Manuscript.  What stout Tory, indeed, would doze of an evening on such a sheet!  There followed of course cases of libel.  The editors even found it safer, after the publication of the first number, to retire for a time to the country until the city cooled.

I choose now to turn to the pages of these three reviews and set out before you samples of their criticisms, in order that you may contrast them with our own literary judgments.  I warn you in fairness that I have been disposed to choose the worst, yet there are hundreds of other criticisms but little better.  Of the three reviews, Blackwood’s was the least seriously political in its policy, yet its critical vilifications are the worst.  The Edinburgh Review, the most able of the three and the most in earnest in politics, is the least vituperative.  With this introduction, let us shake the pepperpot and lay out the strong vinegar of our feast!

In the judgment of the Edinburgh Review, Tom Moore, who had just published his “Odes and Epistles” but had not yet begun his Irish melodies, is a man who “with some brilliancy of fancy, and some show of classical erudition ... may boast, if the boast can please him, of being the most licentious of modern versifiers, and the most poetical of those who, in our times, have devoted their talents to the propagation of immorality.  We regard his book, indeed, as a public nuisance....  He sits down to ransact the impure places of his memory for inflammatory images and expressions, and commits them laboriously in writing, for the purpose of insinuating pollution into the minds of unknown and unsuspecting readers.”

Francis Jeffrey wrote this, and Moore challenged him to fight.  The police interfered, and as Jeffrey put it, “the affair ended amicably.  We have since breakfasted together very lovingly.  He has expressed penitence for what he has written and declared that he will never again apply any little talents he may possess to such purpose:  and I have said that I shall be happy to praise him whenever I find that he has abjured these objectionable topics.”  It was Sydney Smith who said of Jeffrey he would “damn the solar system—­bad light—­planets too distant—­pestered with comets.  Feeble contrivance—­could make a better with great ease.”